August 21st: Cadbury Eclairs Hazelnut Twist

Kcal 35 Fat 1.3g Fat(sats) 0.7g Carbs 5.0g (per sweet)

Cadbury/Mondelez/Kraft …. whatever you want to call them, have been going at big time recently with new products hitting our shelves seemingly every week. Cadbury Dairy Milk Creations, Cadbury Dairy Milk Freddo Faces, Cadbury Crispello Vanilla ... the list could seemingly go on forever. That may sound like a criticism but given the general quality and variety of the new products we are all for it and we were delighted to hear about their latest addition to the Cadbury Éclairs range. Since time began we can’t remember the range ever being broader than just the classic plain chocolate offering!? Last month however we came to learn that the Ecalirs would be given a ‘Hazelnut Twist - today we got the chance to give them a try.

We were sent some samples of these by one of Cadbury’s many PR agencies and received several 180.0g bags that we distributed amongst the team. On-pack the contents were described as ‘Caramels with Hazelnut Flavour Milk Chocolate Centres’ with the outer bag and inner foil wrappers differentiated from the standard Eclairs through use of a more prominent brown colour scheme. Discarded from their wrappings the sweets looked no different to usual. No one in the team picked up on any nutty aromas either which was unsurprising given that Eclairs have never been regarded as strong in that sense.

Cadbury Eclairs are one of the products that can commonly be seen occupying desks of the ChocolateMIssion taste team so all felt well placed to offer their opinions on how these matched up to expectations. Luckily for the sake of our write-up the opinions were all pretty unanimous and each taste tester reported very similar experiences. The commonality of the reports started with everyone’s enjoyment of the outer caramel which remained the same delicious buttery, sweet offering you get from the originals. Unfortunately the reports on the hazelnut flavour Cadbury milk chocolate inside got widespread feedback of disappointment with nearly all of the taste testers not getting the desired nutty flavours they wanted. Many described it as underwhelming and said that there was only a minor woody nut hint on offer from the usual sweet milk chocolate flavours. The team still reported them as satisfying given their long mouth longevity but said they failed to satisfy their chocolate nut cravings.

Overall it is always very hard to score reviews like these as whilst the team still enjoyed them and polished off their sample bags in double quick time, the product fundamentally didn’t deliver on its USP (unique selling point). The promise of a ‘Hazelnut Twist’ sets the consumer up with expectations of a chocolate nut experience however these Cadbury Eclairs Hazelnut Twist have to be considered a big disappointment when considered in that light. For that reason we have to rate this vastly behind the Cadbury Eclairs classics. Cadbury/Mondelez/Kraft haven’t served up many failures of late but these Cadbury Eclairs Hazelnut Twist have to be categorised on the lower end of the scale of the ‘priority to try’ list. Anyone paying attention will also be aware that there is a new Cadbury Eclairs Orange variant doing the rounds – review of course coming to a ChocolateMission near you soon ;-)